Interleaved Effects in Inductive Category Learning: The Role of Memory Retention

Interleaved effects are widely documented. Research demonstrates that interleaved presentation orders, as opposed to blocked orders typically benefit inductive category learning. What drives interleaved effects is less straightforward. Interleaved presentations provide both the opportunity to compare and contrast between different types of category exemplars, which are temporally juxtaposed, and the opportunity to space study of the same type of category exemplars, which are temporally separated within the presentation span. Accordingly, interleaved effects might be driven by enhanced discrimination, enhanced memory retention, or both in some measure. Though recent studies have largely endorsed enhanced discrimination as the critical mechanism driving interleaved effects, there is no strong evidence to controvert the contribution of enhanced memory retention for interleaved effects. I further examined the role of memory retention by manipulating both presentation order and category structure. Across two experiments I found that memory retention may drive interleaved effects in categorization tasks